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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Lucy Sont about her book titled 19 Reservoirs on their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City, published by the experiment in 2022. Taking us just north mostly of New York City today to help us understand how the city went from being, to be honest, with not a very nice smelling feeling place in the late 1800s to today where there's a whole bunch of water that these reservoirs, which are still there, provide the city with. There's in fact, as the title suggests, 19 of them, an entire network of reservoirs and aqueducts that were built across a huge range of land in upstate New York. And so of course, that creates a lot of history for us to talk about in terms of how that happened. So, Lucy, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
C
I'm delighted to be here.
B
Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book.
C
My name is Lucy Sant and I've been, well, I've been a professional writer since 1981. This book is maybe my ninth, I think. And I, well, I was born in Belgium. I grew up there and in New Jersey, and then I spent my entire youth in New York City and I've been up here in the Hudson River Valley. For the last 25 years. And I've written about everywhere I've lived. And this is, this is my local book, which also has to do with my fascination with the reservoirs, especially when, when I first moved upstate, which is when I started renting up in Delaware county in the Northwest catskills in the 1990s. And I was not far from the Pacton Reservoir, and there were people around who had been displaced by the building of that reservoir in the early 1950s. And there was a whole haunted atmosphere about this. Well, it was a great tragedy. For one thing, it was a disaster for these people who were never quite fully accepted into new communities, which were very clannish and internal. And then I moved to just really down the street from the Ashokan Reservoir in the year 2000, and that happened much farther back. That was before World War I. But, you know, as I discovered, especially since publishing this book, I've gotten quite a lot of mail from locals and there are, there are people who's carried their family resentments from 1911 to the present, you know, so this beauty, this tension, these vast work, ferrionic works in the countryside, it was just a subject that I knew I was going to write about for about the last 25 years. And I finally did it.
B
Yeah, there's a whole bunch to get into from just what you've told us so far. And the first is obviously, of course, kind of how far back this goes. So you mentioned sort of 1911, then you talk in the book kind of a bit further back. Even this starts, so when is it that interest in developing reservoirs north of New York City began? And to what extent was at this point just kind of an idea versus something that people, people were starting to explore and do something about?
C
Well, it all started with this remarkable article in a supplement to scientific American in 1888, which was amplified some while a year or two later by its author. And it was remarkably prophetic. The author, who didn't seem to have ever visited the area, describes exactly where the dam should be, and which is kind of breathtaking because they did like years and years of testing before deciding on that very spot later on. And, you know, he talks about the pros and cons and basically treats the area such this, this particular valley of the Esopus Creek through Ulster County, New York, which will head south and rise up again and feed into the Hudson river at Saugerties. But this particular stretch of it he imagined as being the site for this reservoir. And that was in 1888. And work got started on the Reservoir itself. I've got to actually look this up. Oh, 1907. 1907 is when they started building the cofferdam and obviously had been worked up to. I think it was put into motion in 1901, which is to say while they were still working on the new Croton Reservoir, which is the major reservoir east of the Hudson. And so they'd already expanded from the original Croton Reservoir, and now. But they knew that, you know, the demand was just going to be exponential as more people moved in to New York City, as buildings got taller, water pressure had to be sufficient to reach the top floors of warehouses, or you lose millions. You know, that they were thinking commercially before they thought of people's needs and. And this colonial attitude, you know, well, they're people, but, you know, we could just brush them out of the way. We are millions, they are dozens. And so they went ahead and. And, of course, you have to remember that they started building reservoirs in near the end of the first half of the 19th century. And those were not, you know, events covered by the press. We only have a few disparate accounts of resentment and resistance by locals. And it doesn't become, well, actually, you know, the Ashokan Reservoir. You have to read between the lines, you know, that there was resistance and, you know, resentments. Well, there certainly it was a resentment, but it's not often depicted in the press a bit, though, when it is, it's in the Kingston Freeman, the local Ulster county paper still exists today. The second one they built at the Gilboa Dam, where they had to flood the village of Gilboa. They. Then you start to get stories in the press about people barricading themselves in their houses and having to be lured out or forced out, you know, houses set on fire by the. The. The people who are vacating the town. And, you know, it's. That's the only time you really hear about actual violence. But I'm absolutely certain it happened in other places, too. In any case, through Ashokin Gilboa, which was in the early 1950s. And then there were also a couple of smaller ones to the south in really much less populated areas that you barely heard about at all. And then the last one, Cannonsville, which opened in 1967. So naturally, there's still a lot of people who were very much alive who went through that one. And, you know, this. There's always been. I mean, since the early 19th century, you read press accounts of the arrogance with which New York City treats these lesser counties, you know, because they're not Progressing. They're just rural, they're beauty spots, they're useless. There's no industry going on. What is the point of their being these places? That's the attitude. So, so they're building these reservoirs with this attitude of, you know, we are vastly superior to you and it is our God given right to take your resources because there are only, you know, 16 people in your county anyway. The numbers were really very small then, but, you know, nevertheless, in the Ashokan Reservoir submerged, I believe it was nine villages and five and four in Cannonsville. And some of these villages were tiny, but you know, the town of Shavertown had three gas stations, it had multiple churches, you know, it was big enough for that. And family. There was a lot less migration in America by then. The, the westward drive had stopped. So a lot of these people, their families had settled there when everybody else did. Which is to say probably in the case of the Pacton Reservoir after the War of 1812 in early 19th century, they'd been there all along. That's all they knew. They hardly ever left, they hardly left their village. And suddenly it was all taken away from them. The whole landscape of social fabric, everything at the same time, of course, you have a city of immigrants with constantly increasing population and need. And the remarkable thing, the story that runs in counterpart to the story of the reservoirs is the story of the water meters. Now you think, okay, it doesn't seem natural that apartment houses, for example, be metered for their use of water. But this was proposed in an editorial by the New York Times in 1851, and it wasn't until 2006 that they finally decided that, yeah, most places are probably metered, but a lot of them aren't, but we're not going to pursue it any further. And every time they're building a new reservoir, people are saying, instead of building a new reservoir, why don't we start monitoring how much water is being used? And it never happens. And it goes through all kinds of mayoral administrations from Bostweed to, I don't know, trying to think of the last Mayor Bloomberg probably. And, you know, so there's an inarguable need for water in the city. Without water, it's going to shrink away, it's going to cease to exist, and it's going to spread that population elsewhere in the world. So, you know, it's a trolley problem. You know, it's, it's. There's no right answer.
B
Yeah, it's certainly very complicated with lots of different needs on various sides. But you said earlier the People in not living in the big cities. Right. The 16 people in the county.
D
Right.
B
The. That their land was taken away as these plans kind of got more momentum. Can you tell us more about actually how that worked? I mean, are we talking military force? Are we talking the city buying it up? Are we talking court orders? Like, how did the city take control of the land?
C
The city bought this land. What they would do was they had three persons assessment boards, which consisted of one person from New York City, one from Ulster county from the local, and one from some other county. And the three of them would announce a price, and then representatives of the property owners would counteract. And sometimes they'd have whole bunches of local officials even sometimes bring in New York acquaintances to, on their behalf, to count, to argue their case. And. But the city was determined they had a hidden number. And they would offer 25% of what they thought the real value was, but they would present some other number much lower than the real value. And in some cases, they just misunderstood what was going on. They refused to make allowances for land that was not only used for residents, but also for business. So the owners of boarding houses, which were the main form of tourist accommodation then, or owners of quarries, you know, farmland, while they paid for fruit trees, they paid for stuff like that. But there was like so many, you know, school houses. They. They ignored the use value of this land. And also people whose livelihoods were terminated by the move, which is most people, and those things. There were many, many lawsuits over the years, and they finally got around to according them some decades after Ashokan.
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Got it. Okay. So that's the kind of process we're talking about. And as you've mentioned, there's definitely some local pushback there. However, the city did buy the land and started doing some pretty intensive works with them. So can you tell us a bit about some of the large construction projects that were onto undertaken and how they were carried out?
C
Oh yeah. Well, Ashokin, Papacton and Cannonsville were all enormous, pipactin being the largest in the whole system. And pipactin is bigger than all the reservoirs on the east side of the Hudson combined. And they're pharaonic works. There's loads and loads of beautiful pictures. I, I've got to say this book, by the way, one thing that a, an audio discussion can't convey is how beautiful an object it is. The, the people I worked with in illustrating it were just a dream. The designer was a genius. It's fabulously illustrated and, and I forget where I was going with that.
B
You were going to tell us about how some of the things that the Pict were built. The reservoirs, the dams, the big construction projects.
C
So the, the photographic documentation of Ashoken especially. Yeah, and it's like watching people build the pyramids or something. It's these massive works, tiny humans, you know, and it took years. It took Ashokin end to end, took like seven years. I think that's, yeah, 1916 maybe or 15. It's, it's a bit, you know, they, it had various official openings and things. So it, it varies but, but it, it, you know, now it still looks pretty impressive and it's all New York City land, you know, that's the funny Thing if you, if you had a traffic accident while you're on the, in the area of the reservoir, the cops will be dep. Cops and you will be dealing with New York City law rather than local stuff. It affects the local mentality in multiple ways. You know, that, I mean, the very, very strict regulations regarding agriculture for a wide circle around each of these reservoirs and which really impacted the area when there was more subsistence agriculture going on. Now, that's, you know, gone down quite a bit. And, and a lot of, frankly, a lot of the land around where the reservoirs were built was not the greatest for agriculture anyway. It's in mountain, you know, it's stony Delaware county, which is where both the Pacton and, and Cannonsville are. There was a history of the county that was called Two Stones for every dirt, which is pretty much about. I, I, I know because I made gardens in that county, and it's really like that.
B
So that means it would have been really hard to build these things. Right.
C
If we're talking about mountainous territory, well, mountain valleys, it's. So it's not, you know, there were not so many gigantic boulders, but, but, yeah, actually, no, there actually was quite a lot of stonework for the Gilboa Dam for the runoff. They had to tunnel through, like, 14 miles of rock to go down from there to join up again with the Esopus Valley with, you know, which flowing into the Ashokan. So, and you have to imagine this is with the technology of 1912. 19, 1919, you know, 1921, it was. And also they had to tunnel these vast distances to the Hudson river and under the river, which was, and it's all by gravity.
B
So who was doing this work? Was it. I mean, obviously you've been talking about the people who lived there, their livelihoods being disrupted, but there weren't that many people, not enough to do what sounds like massive work. So who were these workers? Where were they coming from?
C
Well, they came from all over, from the city, from bigger cities, from Rochester, from Utica, from Albany. And in the case of the Ashokan Reservoir, they were literally rafting them up to Hudson from Ellis Island. They went directly from Ellis island to the construction site of the Ashokan Dam. And there were people from, well, in those years, it was Eastern Europe, Italy, Russia, Scandinavia still. And beginning with the Gilboa Dam, large numbers of American Indian laborers from the Mohawk Nation especially.
B
And who paid for all of this?
C
The city of New York taxes.
B
You know, that's a lot of money.
C
It is, but it, it's not. Again, as I Emphasize they try to do it as much on the cheap as possible, which means, you know, swindling all these landowners. Swindling all these landowners. And then after the reservoirs were built, refusing to pay taxes to the point where the, the city managers of three or four towns around the Ashokan Reservoir put the reservoir up for sale in the 30s until the city coughed up back back payments.
B
Speaking actually of the 30s. I mean, this is a huge project, loads of people, loads of money, loads of time. If we're continuing construction, as you discuss in the book, I mean, yes, we're starting in the sort of teens and twenties, but it goes on for quite a few decades. So how do other big events like the Great Depression, how does that impact this?
C
I don't believe there was actually work going on during the Great Depression because the next two, Rondout and Neversink, begin in the late 30s and then actually both of them start up in the late 30s and then abruptly come to a halt with the war and don't pick up again until a few years after the end of the war. So they started like 1937 and they're done. They're finally open in 1954. 55.
B
Okay, so the World War II just completely stopped construction.
C
Right, right. And then by the time of Pepacton, you know, that's when America is entering into prosperity and Cannonsville comes at the point peak of American prosperity.
B
Does that change at all the way in which this is financed or the legal efforts of people trying to protest against the city's acquisition of land, given that it's pretty different conditions people are living in in the 1950s than in the 1910s?
C
Yeah, well, you know, it doesn't stop the basic conflict. A, the idea that, you know, in many individual lives are impacted is given short shrift by the argument of the teeming masses on the other side. That never goes away. People proposing solutions that may or may not be feasible. I mean, over and over and over you have people suggesting that they should simply dam the Hudson river either at, you know, at first it was like they wanted early 19th century, they were going to dam it around at Harlem. Later ON in the 20th century, it was supposed to dam it at Halfer Straw. And the fact is that a lot of towns already drink water from the Hudson, including the city of Albany. And my neighbors right across the inlet, the Rondout Creek pours into the Hudson. In my town, the village on the other side of the creek, which is Port Ewen, drinks Hudson river water. We drink water from our own reservoir which is adjacent to the New York one, New York City one. You know, it's. It's unequal distribution of everything. And of course, Hudson River Valley water is known too. Hudson. Hudson river water is known to be full of pcbs. You know, it's forever chemicals. And presumably our water doesn't have those. You know, they're coming down through, you know, from mountain springs, through layers of hard stone, so they've been purified. You know, that was another thing that was stressed in that 1888 Scientific American article, was the purity of the water in its geological formation. You know, it's below a certain level, it doesn't have this, it has that instead, etc.
B
That's definitely an impact that I imagine the city was not talking about when they were going and acquiring all this land and making all these construction efforts.
C
Right. Wait, what are, what are they not talking about?
B
The environmental impacts of all of this?
C
Oh, no. I mean, nobody talked about environmental impact in those years, you know, so even.
B
After, when we move from the sort of early 1900s into the post war period and locals are, as you discussed, still not happy about these construction efforts, what are they protesting? If it's not the environmental issues, what are the concerns at this point?
C
Well, they're protesting the loss of their homes, of their livelihoods, of the only places they've ever lived in, most of the time. They lived in these kind of. It is a really kind of picturesque Americana idea of what the village is. These villages, you know, the kind we see only in movies. Everybody knows everybody, probably related to everybody. And so they're talking about the impact on their own environment. The broader environment was barely a concern to anyone during these years. You know, the awakening was beginning around the time the construction of the last one, the Cannonsville Reservoir in 1967. Yeah, no, I mean, there were no ecological studies done. There was no biologists measuring lost habitats of animals or birds. We don't know what species might have been lost forever. We have no idea.
B
Was there any way that locals were able to get some of the things back? I mean, I know in the book you talk about fishing rights, for instance, was this an area where some negotiation was possible?
C
Well, that was the one New York City concession to the locals is that about a few years after they built Ashokin, they granted fishing rights. And that's been the case with the other reservoirs as well. It's stringent regulation. You have to use a certain kind of boat and only that kind of boat, etc, you know, but that is allowed. Nothing else is allowed. No, no, no bathing, you know, no water skiing, no boating, really. I mean, you can only use these flat bottom aluminum boats with oars. It's otherwise, I mean, and, and it's this scenario without lakes and where these rivers have been really altered by the, the, by the reservoirs. You know, they were recreational rivers, people would canoe on them, et cetera. It's hard now because ether, they're like advancing at massive speed. There was a tube site, you know, where you could float on inner tubes on the upper Esopus Creek above the reservoirs. And they finally, my son worked there for a while. It finally shut down because fatalities, among other things, lawsuits. And on the other side, the leading away from the, the Ashokan, I have a friend who has a cabin and it used to be a healthy river. You know, you used to be able to take a canoe down it and now it's a trickle. It will sometimes come up to your mid calf, sometimes up to waste, but no deeper than that. And, and then sometimes it's a roaring river when they're releasing water from the spillway of the reservoir and you know, trees get taken away, that kind of thing. So it's, they, you know, it's in many, many, many ways it's altered the county profoundly.
B
You mentioned right at the beginning of our conversation that there's still families who remember and resent this today. Is there anything further you want to tell us about the sort of legacies of this now, even though obviously the construction stopped a long time ago?
C
Well, the main legacy is a continuation of the legacy that was in place beginning in the early 19th century with, you know, locals resenting the superior and colonial attitude of the city of New York. And the reservoirs only cemented this, only made it more virulent, and you have a lot of that. And what's been happening here, especially, oh my God, especially in the last five years, especially since COVID is a massive influx of New Yorkers. There was one earlier, actually after 9, 11 as well. And with the New Yorkers comes all this money, but also attitude and also liberal opinion, you know, and that polarizes things. And that's a story that's gone on around the country for a long time that we can see a certain kind of result of. This is the election of Donald Trump. It's, you know, America in rural America feels left out of the conversation. They don't so much as so much resent the people with the actual power as they do the, the people they see as their rivals for attention and for wealth. In fact, you know, all those People who aren't as deserving as they are by virtue of not being American enough or being deviant or whatever. So. So there is a tension around here. It's. I mean, it's become a very democratic area, Ulster county especially, and which is quite a change from the way it was even 50 years ago. And the locals who grew up hunting and fishing and all that kind of stuff has seen all that regulated very severely. It's a balance much, I'm sure, like that which happens in many other parts of the world where the poor farmers have been losing it for a century and the rich people acquiring more and more. Or, you know, in Europe, I mean, where my. My grandparents lost their. Their tenancy, they were tenant farmers with the start of the Depression, and their stone farmhouse is now used by skiers at the local slopes. It's. You know, it's a rental house, and it's beautiful. You know, I see the same kind of tension. It's the class struggle. It's taken many, many forms, and it's illustrated in this particularly strange and complex way with the story of the reservoirs.
B
Yeah, it's all very intertwined in this instance. So thank you for helping us understand those different strands. You mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that your books are often reflections of or about places you live. Obviously, it sounds like you're still in the Hudson Valley, and this is very much a story of that place. Do you have any upcoming or current work that you'd like to give us a brief sneak preview of as a final question in our conversation?
C
Well, I will sooner or later have two books out because I've already finished one. But the one that will be published first is. It's about New York city in the 1960s as seen in with the central figure of the Velvet Underground, the rock band, and a portrait of not just bohemia, New York, but what the city felt like and what it felt like in the 60s, this period of great excitement and great change. And then after that, my book on writing, which is called how to Sit.
B
Down, sounds like you're going to be keeping very busy. So thank you for taking the time to speak to us about your book, published in 2022 by the Experiment, titled 19 Reservoirs on their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City. Thank you so much for joining me, Lucy.
C
Well, thank you, Miranda. Be well.
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Episode Date: September 14, 2025
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Lucy Sante
Book Discussed: Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City (The Experiment, 2022)
This episode features an in-depth conversation between Dr. Miranda Melcher and author Lucy Sante, focusing on the creation of the reservoir system that supplies water to New York City. Sante’s book uncovers the complex history, social impact, and ongoing legacy of the construction of nineteen reservoirs and the accompanying aqueducts in upstate New York. The discussion explores themes of displacement, environmental transformation, urban privilege, and local resentment, providing a nuanced look at how major infrastructure projects shape lives and landscapes for generations.
Lucy Sante’s tone is elegiac yet incisive—both lamenting the losses endured by rural communities and critically probing the urban logic that drove such developments. The conversation blends personal anecdote, historical insight, and sharp social observation.